The way of the Cross
John Monash wrote to his wife three days after Broodseinde. ‘Great happenings are possible in the very near future,’ he reported. The Germans were ‘terribly disorganised’. The day before Monash had told his brother-in-law that the Germans were ‘staggering’. Twelve days later he was writing that Australians were being ‘sacrificed in hair-brained [sic] ventures’.
Twelve days and Monash’s mood had changed utterly. But in that time his division had been in the battle for Passchendaele village. In those twelve days the rains had come, day after day. The downpours not only changed the landscape, returning it to lakes and bog holes, but also the conduct of the British commanders. Until the coming of the rain Haig, acting not altogether in character, and Plumer, acting entirely in character, had been careful investors. They contented themselves with shallow advances that could be guaranteed by artillery. Now they became gamblers, betting that the wet ground would not impede them too much, that their heavy guns would not sink in the mud each time they were fired and that their field pieces could actually be dragged forward.
Bean had seen more of the ground than most of the generals. He later wrote that the campaign, in these days before the lunges at Passchendaele, took on the trappings of a classical tragedy. The cast, one has to say, might have appealed to Homer or Tolstoy. There was Haig, desperate for a victory that he could hurl back at his detractors in London. And Plumer, being carried along not, as he usually was, by his own good sense, but by the mood of bravado coming out of Haig’s headquarters. And Gough, the former firebrand, now unsure of himself. And Charteris, lurking in shadows just off stage and whispering stories of how the Germans were on the lip of moral collapse. And Monash, a mere divisional commander, who was hearing one story from the staff officers in the châteaux to the west and another from his men in the mud to the east. And Birdwood, the administrative head of the AIF, who would dissent, but carefully. In London there was Robertson, who didn’t much believe in Third Ypres but thought that supporting it was better than siding with a huddle of dithering politicians. And there were the dithering politicians themselves, who wanted to tut-tut about Third Ypres but would not monitor it, would not look at the detail. There was Lloyd George who had the power to call off the campaign but didn’t. And back in Australia there was Billy Hughes, unaware that his Australians were being sacrificed at a faster rate than at any time in the war, and thinking about conscription again.
HAIG BROUGHT UP the cavalry after the victory at Broodseinde. We should not blame him for still seeing cavalry as the arm of mobile warfare. We can blame him for failing to accept what military leaders had known for thousands of years, that horses are useless in bogs. And the battlefield was a bog again. This was the trouble: Haig and Plumer and the staff officers who buzzed around them didn’t know what the battlefield was like.
There had been drizzle on the day after Broodseinde, showers on the day after that, squalls on the day after that and torrential rain on the 8th. The meteorologists now said things would worsen: a storm was blowing in from Ireland. The troops in the field were exhausted from working on roads and light railways, and simply from dragging one clay-caked leg after another. Guns could not be moved. Gunners could not find stable platforms for the heavies. Clay had to be scraped off shells before they could be loaded. Men and mules drowned when they strayed from the duckboards. Spotter aircraft could not fly.
Haig had to decide whether to close down the campaign. He knew by now that his dream of taking the Belgian coast was dead, at least for 1917. But Passchendaele village still mesmerised him. If he took that, he could at least say that he had thrown the Germans off the ridges. According to Edmonds, the British official historian, Haig called a conference after the squalls on the 7th. Edmonds says Gough and Plumer wanted to end the campaign. If this is true, there is no written evidence of it. And the anecdotal evidence suggests the opposite. Gough doesn’t mention the conference in his memoirs. Harington, Plumer’s chief-of-staff, told war correspondents at a briefing the next day that while the flats were wet, the crest of the ridge was ‘as dry as a bone’. Bean, who was at the briefing, wrote in his diary:
I believe the official attitude is that Passchendaele Ridge is so important that tomorrow’s attack is worth making whether it succeeds or fails … I suspect that they are making a great, bloody experiment – a huge gamble … I feel, and most of the correspondents feel, awfully anxious – terribly anxious – about tomorrow. They don’t know the fight there was for the last ridge, these major generals back there … They don’t realise how much desperately hard it will be to fight down such opposition in the mud, rifles choked, LGs [Lewis Guns] out of action, men tired and slow – a new division like the 66th amongst them! Every step means dragging one foot out of the mud … I shall be very surprised if this fight succeeds. They are banking on their knowledge of the German troops demoralisation … They don’t realise how very strong our morale had to be to get through the last three fights.
Anyway, regardless of who said what at the conference on the 7th, Haig was always going to prevail and his army commanders were always going to defer. That was how GHQ worked. And Haig wanted to go on. One might have thought that he would have felt the need to look at the state of the ground for himself. One can only wonder at his lack of curiosity. Passchendaele village, it was decided, would be taken in two steps, the first on October 9, the second on the 12th.
THE FIRST STEP came to be known as the battle of Poelcappelle, after the secondary objective, a village on Gough’s front. Godley’s II Anzac Corps, which had been loaned two British divisions, the 49th and the 66th, would make the main thrust. The two British divisions would be doing the attacking. Birdwood’s I Anzac Corps would be on their right, the 2nd Australian Division guarding the flank of the 66th. The attack was to go in at 5.20 am. It was still raining at midnight. Birdwood favoured a postponement but apparently did not ask for one, perhaps because he had the lesser task in the operation. Godley had the main task; it wasn’t his way to protest.
The 66th Division had only recently arrived in France. The approach to the front was hellish for the new soldiers. The duck-boards were slippery and in some places shattered or submerged. Men fell into shell holes and the water there was so rank that some vomited upon being pulled out. After five hours they had covered a mile. It was midnight and they had another mile-and-a-half to go to reach the tapes (which, incidentally, had been fitted with aluminium discs to prevent them sinking in the slime). They were not going to make the tapes by zero hour. The plan had called for them to be at the start line by midnight so that they might rest for five hours before attacking.
The 49th, the other British division under Godley’s control, made the tapes on time but the men were worn out, covered with slime and white-faced from the cold. An English war correspondent who saw them said they looked like men who had been buried alive and dug up again.
The artillerymen who were to supply the barrage had to leave guns behind bogged. One pair of Australian six-inch howitzers was fifteen times derailed from the light railway. Mules carried the ammunition forward. Their trip from the wagon-lines to the batteries had taken around an hour in the dry weather; now it took seventeen. Mules were shot where they lay bogged. The gunners worked to exhaustion. The barrage they eventually put down was so light that infantrymen often could not pick up the line of it.
The infantrymen went out into the swamp below Passchendaele village. Some made progress; most didn’t. Germans untouched by the barrage sniped at them with rifles. Men following the bed of a tiny stream towards Passchendaele found themselves waist-deep in water. Others came upon wire uncut by the barrage. This was nothing like the three step-by-step attacks that preceded it. They went to a timetable and the results seemed predestined; this was chaos.
The Australian 2nd Division on the flank of the two hapless British divisions put in two brigades, the 5th and the 6th. The 5th had been in reserve at Broodseinde and could field some 2000 men. The 6th had not only fought at Broodseinde; afterwards, as the rain tumbled down, the men had been used to lay cables and extend duckboards. These men had slept in water-filled shell holes. They had no greatcoats, just capes. Hundreds collapsed with exhaustion; others came down with trench foot. The 6th Brigade could field only about 600 men for the battle. The two brigades went out into the bog, did better than most, and ran up 1253 casualties.
The attack failed just about everywhere. Plumer’s run of successes had ended. His formula rested on the inspired use of artillery. It was worthless once the ground became so wet that guns could not be dragged forward and wire remained uncut. Nor could it work if infantrymen were exhausted before they even crossed the start tapes.
But unreality had now set in. For what would be called the first battle of Passchendaele, set down for October 12, three days after Poelcappelle, the infantrymen were to advance up to 2500 yards, much further than they had been asked to go in the three successful battles. In truth the 3rd Australian Division and the New Zealand Division would have to go further if they were to push beyond Passchendaele village. Haig, Plumer and Godley had all misread what had happened in the battle of Poelcappelle. Plumer told Haig that the line had been pushed forward, thus making the capture of Passchendaele easier. Haig, in turn, refused to be downcast about the weather. His diary entries suggest he had no notion of how bad the ground was, how ineffective his artillery had become or even where the frontline lay. On the night after Poelcappelle he wrote in his diary: ‘The results were very successful.’
Events were not going his way in London either. He received a note from Robertson on the day Passchendaele began. Lloyd George was ‘out for my blood’, Robertson said. The Prime Minister’s conduct was ‘intolerable’. Matters might come to a head. ‘I rather hope so. I am sick of this d----d life.’
All this – the mud on the battlefield, the tension in London – seemed to wash over Haig like a passing breeze. It was as if he only saw what he wanted to see. He met Raymond Poincaré, the French President, briefly on October 11. Poincaré asked him when operations would stop. The question offended Haig, who told him his only thought was to attack. In his diary that night Haig called the President a ‘humbug’.
In London the chief of intelligence at the War Office, Brigadier-General George Macdonogh, a career-officer of sharp intellect, had been questioning whether German morale really was collapsing. Haig wrote in his diary: ‘I cannot think why the War Office Intelligence Dept. gives such a wrong picture of the situation except that Gen Macdonagh (DMI) is a Roman Catholic and is (perhaps unconsciously) influenced by information which doubtless reaches him from tainted (i.e. catholic) sources.’
Charteris, meanwhile, suddenly gave up hope. His Pauline conversion came when he visited the front on the day of Poelcappelle. There was no chance of complete success in the salient this year, he wrote in his diary the next day. All he could see now was ‘the awfulness of it all’. But he didn’t say this to Haig.
When men from Monash’s division came up to relieve the 66th Division on October 10 the Englishmen were unsure where their front lay. Lieutenant Walde Fisher, a university tutor, went forward to scout, picking his way among the dead. He came upon fifty English soldiers sheltering in a pillbox. ‘Never have I seen men so broken or demoralised,’ he wrote. Wounded lay everywhere, groaning and moaning. And the rain kept falling.
The next day, the eve of the battle, Monash’s men finally worked out what had happened. The English division had hardly pushed forward at all. This meant the Australians would have to advance close to 3000 yards the next day, more than had ever been attempted in Plumer’s set-pieces over dry ground. It also meant their barrage had to be brought back 350 yards and that they would have to hurry forward at a pace never attempted during Plumer’s attacks in dry weather. The evidence suggests that Godley and Monash didn’t know precisely where the front was on the eve of the battle or how bad things were on the ground. Monash told his wife afterwards that he sought, and was denied, a postponement of twenty-four hours. What he perhaps should have done is gone to the front himself rather than sitting in his headquarters trying to make sense of the conflicting reports of junior officers floundering around in the mud.
HAIG TALKED TO the war correspondents before the battle opened. Bean said Charteris sat alongside the commander-in-chief in a drawing room with gilt Louis XVI chairs and a fine view over the French plain towards Hazebrouck and St Omer. ‘[Haig] sat down with us around him. He is a gauche, nervous man in drawing room functions, but here he had something to say & he was at his best. He rubbed his hands, a sign of nervousness, I thought; but he spoke straight enough.’
One of the journalists asked about the mud. Could this be mentioned in press reports without cheering the Germans? Haig said the best thing was to tell the truth, from which Bean concluded that the field-marshal had not been much consulted in censorship matters. ‘It was simply the mud which defeated us on Tuesday [the battle of Poelcappelle],’ Haig said. ‘The men did splendidly to get through it as they did; but the Flanders mud, as you know, is not a new invention. It has a name in history – it has defeated other armies before this one and it is tremendously difficult to make even as much headway against it as the troops did … I certainly think you should explain the difficulty of the mud.’
Bean stayed behind to ask Haig about a minor matter. Haig told Bean the Australian army had some very capable commanders. He singled out Monash – ‘a very solid man’. This caused Bean to fall into politicking. He knew Haig was thinking of forming an Australian corps with Monash in command and Birdwood as administrative head. It would be a great pity to change Birdwood’s position, Bean said. Australians trusted him; he had won himself a great place with them.
Haig agreed but said Australia should have a corps commander and a complete corps staff. ‘Yes, sir,’ said Bean, ‘you know, we look upon General White as the greatest soldier we have by a long way …’ It is not clear whom we constituted in this case. The average Australian soldier didn’t know White. The men didn’t mention him in their letters home, as they did Birdwood, Hooky Walker and Pompey Elliott. Bean idolised White, like a boy in awe of his headmaster. He saw Monash as an upstart who didn’t play by the school rules. He wrote in his diary after this meeting that Monash, if appointed, would go along with Haig and GHQ. Haig would be glad to be rid of the ‘independence’ of Birdwood and White. Here one has to wonder about the word independence. Was independence apparent when the 5th Division was handed over for ritual slaughter at Fromelles, or at the two Bullecourts?
Bean wrote that Haig impressed him more than he ever had before. He was ‘slow but very clean; quite different from Charteris’. Haig had earlier been asked about the morale of the German army and, according to Bean, had ‘referred over his shoulder to Charteris; as though Charteris keeps that portion of his brain & he completely relies upon him’.
SISTER ELSIE GRANT had served at an Australian casualty-clearing station near Ypres during Gough’s waterlogged offensive in August. The hospital had been shelled for the third time. ‘Those brutal Germans deliberately shell our hospital with all our poor helpless boys but really God was good to us. We had four killed but it was just miraculous that there were not dozens killed.’ Grant and the other sisters were sent by car back to a town in France (probably St Omer). Her brother Allan, a grazier from Queensland and now a lieutenant in Monash’s division, had arrived in the same town about two hours before Elsie. He was waiting when she arrived. ‘We all embraced him & the dear left at 5 am next morning.’ Allan didn’t know it then, but he was on his way to Broodseinde and then the first battle of Passchendaele.
Elsie said in her letter that she wanted ‘ever so badly’ to come home ‘but I really can’t bring myself to leave Allan behind. That is the principal reason I don’t come.’
CROWN PRINCE RUPPRECHT of Bavaria, the German commander opposite Plumer and Gough, also kept a diary. On the day the first battle of Passchendaele opened he wrote: ‘Most gratifying – rain: our most effective ally.’
Gough had watched the rain pour down the previous afternoon. His army would be attacking around Poelcappelle simultaneously with Plumer’s at Passchendaele. Gough telephoned Plumer and said the attack should be postponed. Plumer consulted his corps commanders and said, No, it should go ahead. Gough had become the pragmatist and Plumer the romantic.
The plan was for the 3rd Division to attack Passchendaele Ridge and go 400 yards further to the last of three objectives, the Green Line. One of its battalions was carrying an Australian flag – ‘specially worked’ – that would be raised above the village. Haig had told Monash that once the flag was flying the news would be immediately cabled to Australia. The New Zealand Division, north of the Australians, was going for Bellevue Spur on the eastern side of the village. To reach this they had to follow the valley of a stream, the Ravebeek, which was hopelessly flooded. One brigade of the 4th Australian Division would protect the right flank of the 3rd Division.
The two attacking brigades of the 3rd Division spent the night of October 10 on the flat country just east of Ypres. The men lay down on wet ground, huddled under bits of timber and sheets of iron. Next night they began the march to the front. They were shelled with gas soon after they moved off, then the rain came, showers around 1.30 am, heavy rain around 3.30. It was a black night and the men moved in single file, each man clutching the webbing of the man in front.
Bean was writing in a hut near Poperinghe, listening to the patter of rain and the scratching of branches on the roof from a tree being tossed about in the wind. He slept in his clothes for about three-quarters of an hour, then drank some warm cocoa before leaving for the front about 3 am with Keith Murdoch. The misty rain seemed endless and the night was black. The rain became heavier at Ypres. Bean and Murdoch decided to wait for daylight at Monash’s headquarters. They left the car standing up to its axles in water. ‘Zero hour was to be at 5.25 am,’ Bean wrote. ‘The Meteor[ology] report was through by 9 the night before – so the battle could have been stopped. Of course now it was far too late.’
Lieutenant William Palstra of the 3rd Division had been sent forward to find a spot for battalion headquarters and a regimental aid post. The road from Ypres to Zonnebeke astonished him – ‘a hopeless tangle … shelled more or less continuously’. It was one long traffic jam and he found it easier to walk in the mud 100 yards off the road. The road was crowded with three-ton lorries, packhorses, ambulances, motorcycles and lines of wounded and prisoners. Every now and then a German shell would fall among this struggling mass. ‘There would be momentary confusion, and then the wreckage would be pulled to the side of the road, the shell hole filled with anything available – I saw one hole being filled with eighteen-pounder ammunition – and movement at a snail’s pace would recommence.’
Private John Hardie, a machine gunner in Monash’s division, headed for the front on the night of the 11th and stumbled into a bombardment of high-explosive and gas shells. ‘I don’t think I shall ever forget that night even to my dying day,’ he wrote home. ‘Every little track was congested with troops going up … We were slipping and sliding all over the place and falling into shell holes and to make matters worse we were losing men every few yards. Well, we got to our hopping off place … wet to the skin and dead beat.’ The German guns opened up. ‘Battalion after battalion got practically cut to pieces and I don’t know how our team got through but several of them had their clothes torn with bits of shell. I got a small splinter in the hand. We only got about five hundred yards when we were held up.’
The British barrage was feeble by the standards of the three successful battles. The artillerymen couldn’t drag enough guns forward. Sometimes twenty-six horses were harnessed to try to bring one gun up. The platforms of the guns that were firing quivered and sunk in the mud. There are stories of guns sinking up to their muzzles. Warheads would often bury themselves so deeply in the mud before exploding that all they threw up were fountains of brown water and slime. The New Zealanders had a worse front than the Australians because of the flooding of the Ravebeek and the uncut wire in front of them. The New Zealand artillery commander reported on the day before the battle that his guns might be unable to support the infantry properly. No-one, it seems, took any notice of him. Bean had left Ypres to watch the barrage through his telescope. Casual shelling, he called it. One battalion history said the men made no effort to conform to the barrage. ‘There was really nothing to conform to.’
Here was a throwback to the way attacks used to be carried out in the Great War. Why Plumer allowed this to happen is still mostly a mystery. If he is entitled to the credit for the mechanical brilliance of Messines, Menin Road, Polygon Wood and Broodseinde, he must also take much of the blame for First Passchendaele.
THIS TIME THE infantrymen didn’t light up cigarettes and go forward briskly, hugging the screen of their barrage. They came under machine-gun fire from the moment they left the tapes. They had to slither from shell hole to shell hole. They sunk up to their waists. Rifles clogged. Casualties ran up quickly. Eight or more bearers were needed to carry one man out, which meant most of the wounded lay in the slime.
The New Zealand Division set off with no hope. Bean later wrote that no infantry in the world could have crossed the Ravebeek mud, smashed through the uncut wire and assaulted the pillboxes on Bellevue Spur. The right brigade of New Zealanders barely edged past the start line. Machine guns tore through those who made the first belt of wire.
The slaughter of the New Zealanders left the Australians, immediately south of them, open to flanking fire. The Australian brigade alongside the New Zealanders was held up by machine-gun fire near the first objective, about 1000 yards in. The other of Monash’s brigades pushed on towards the second objective. Captain Clarence Jeffries, a young mining surveyor from Wallsend, New South Wales, rushed a pillbox near the highest point of the ridge with about a dozen men, capturing twenty-five Germans and their two machine guns. When Jeffries’ brigade went for the second objective the barrage was so thin that he and other officers could not be sure where it was. Then another machine gun opened up. Jeffries and a small party rushed it. The post was taken but Jeffries was killed. He received the Victoria Cross. To Jeffries’ left, Major Lyndhurst Giblin, a fruit grower from Hobart, was trying to work out where the barrage was. He lived and became Ritchie Professor of Economics at Melbourne University.
About twenty Australians had pushed into Passchendaele. They went straight to the church and found no Germans there. Neither was there any sign of other Australians working their way up. The patrol withdrew. Around this time the senior officer of the right-hand Australian brigade looked about him. Fire was coming from his front and he was losing men every minute. Looking to his left, he knew that the other Australian brigade was well behind him. He sent a note back: ‘What am I to do?’
It was pointless asking those at the rear. Monash, at Ypres, had no notion of what was happening. He merely thought he did. For most of the morning, partly on the basis of reports of what prisoners and wounded Australians had said, he thought his division may have taken the village. Around 11 am he heard that the New Zealand attack had failed. After noon the truth came rushing to meet him. His left brigade, alongside the New Zealanders, was held up; the casualties were heavy. His right brigade had reached the second objective but both its flanks were exposed.
Lieutenant-Colonel Leslie Morshead, a schoolteacher who a quarter of a century later would command an Australian division at Tobruk and El Alamein, sent back a message before noon. ‘Things are bloody, very bloody.’
LIEUTENANT PALSTRA SAID there were two big problems at the front: getting supplies up and getting wounded out. The ground was so soggy that stretcher-bearers could do only two trips a day from the frontline to the clearing stations. ‘In the vicinity of my own battalion regimental aid post, which had been established first in a pillbox and later, as the battalion advanced, in a shell hole, there were many dead, the majority of whom, according to the regimental medical officer, had died from exposure and not primarily from their injuries. It seemed that any man whose wounds prevented him from making his own way to the rear had but a very poor chance of pulling through.’
There is no way of knowing how many men simply drowned. Soldiers’ letters and diaries repeatedly refer to men trapped in mud and crying out for help.
The battle had been lost before it began. It was formally lost on the afternoon of that first day. The two Australian attacking brigades began to fall back on their start lines. There was nothing else they could do. They lacked the artillery support to go on. They were exposed on their left because the New Zealanders had been asked to cross ground that was impassable.
Across the front British losses for the day were 13,000. Gains were negligible. Monash’s division had lost 3200, the New Zealanders 3000, the 4th Australian Division, in support, 1000.
ABOUT A FORTNIGHT after Passchendaele, Sister Elsie Grant received a letter from a sergeant who served with her brother Allan. Lieutenant Grant had been killed during First Passchendaele. In the tradition of such letters Sergeant Carey said Allan had died a ‘grand & noble death fighting for his God, King, Country & dear ones’. In the same tradition the sergeant did not say how Grant died or the nature of his wound. There was a postscript: ‘I have enclosed … a five-pound note which he left in his wallet.’
THE DAY AFTER the battle, Lieutenant Fisher wrote, the Australians, back in their old frontline, were ‘utterly done’. His battalion was down to ninety men; there were twenty-three left in his company. Men were dropping with tiredness. The ground was thick with dead and wounded, some of them Englishmen still out in the weather after the battle of Poelcappelle.
Our men gave all their food and water away, but that was all they could do. That night my two runners were killed as they sat beside me, and casualties were numerous again. He blew me out of my shell hole thrice, so I shifted to an abandoned pillbox. There were twenty-four wounded men inside, two dead Huns on the floor and six outside, in various stages of decomposition. The stench was dreadful … When day broke I looked over the position. Over forty dead lay within twenty yards of where I stood, and the whole valley was full of them.
Sergeant Watkins was kept busy looking after the wounded. ‘During the afternoon of the 13th an Armistice was arranged between us and the Germans so as to give both parties a chance of getting in the wounded. It only lasted a few hours. Our fellows brought in several wounded Tommies, who had been wounded and living in shell holes for four days.’ Watkins’ brigade was relieved at 7 pm. He was exhausted, they all were, and they had to walk four or fives miles back to their camp. Watkins fell into a deep hole and lost his rifle and helmet. Two men pulled him out by extending their rifles for him to grab. When he reached ‘civilisation’ he was given hot cocoa.
One of the most vivid accounts of Passchendaele comes from a medical officer – surname unknown – with an English division on the left of the New Zealanders. The man may have been an Australian and he was probably with the British 18th Division. He was dressing wounded in a shell hole when he felt something red-hot shoot through his neck. He didn’t remember much for a while. Then he heard one of his medical staff saying: ‘Are you dead, sir? Are you dead?’ A sergeant ripped open the medical officer’s tunic. ‘It’s all right, ’e ain’t dead,’ he announced. ‘Bit of blood about, but it’s gone right through.’
It had, a clean in-and-out wound. The medical officer told his parents that ‘for a while all the nerve was knocked out of me and I broke down and sobbed like a confounded baby, for every man seemed to be killed or wounded – Officers, NCOs and men. All the fellows I knew and liked, Pater, men I had been through other shows with.’
The doctor had a good pull on a flask of whisky. After two hours in the shell hole he went back to dressing the wounded. They were crying out: ‘Water, for Gawd’s sake water.’ The doctor said he found a new respect for the Germans. ‘Several times we found ourselves working in places surrounded by shell holes full of Huns but none fired at us. Many pointed to where wounded were lying – Hun snipers pointed to where their victims were … I have never experienced anything like it before …’
He had another pull of whisky and a piece of bread for lunch, then went back to the wounded. He couldn’t bandage any more: his arm was too stiff. There were no other doctors or stretcher-bearers left. All had been killed. ‘To those [wounded] in great pain and [with] no chance of living, I gave enough morphia to put them out peacefully and it was pitiful to hear their thanks with white faces twisted into a smile “Thanks Doc – I’m not afraid but this damn pain gets you down”, or a message to someone at home they would never see again …’
The doctor eventually found his way to a dressing station and thence to hospitals in France and England. He told his parents: ‘I am not very keen about going out again just yet, as my nerves are really pretty rotten, and I still have rather bad nights, when I go over all that awful show again, and I see all those fellows die, and get wounded again every time, but it is passing off.’
PASSCHENDAELE WAS A failure, a wild throw. Yet four days after the battle Lloyd George sent Haig a telegram congratulating him on his achievements in Flanders since July 31. Haig and his men, the Prime Minister said, had shown ‘skill, courage and pertinacity’; they had ‘filled the enemy with alarm’. The Prime Minister told the field-marshal he wanted to renew his ‘assurance of confidence in your leadership’. Why Lloyd George did this is unclear. He hadn’t congratulated Haig on his march from Messines to Broodseinde; he congratulated him after a blunder, which suggests the Prime Minister still wasn’t looking at the detail of the campaign. It was right for him to laud the bravery of the soldiers – this part of the telegram was obviously sincere – but why did he say that he believed in Haig? Nothing had changed in Lloyd George’s mind. He still thought Haig was a dull man running a charnel house. And he had never believed in the Flanders campaign.
Haig was astonished. He copied the contents of the telegram into his diary and then penned a few sentences of his own that ended with exclamation marks. Dull he may have been, but he knew at once this was not what it seemed to be.
GENERAL ARTHUR CURRIE, the citizen-soldier who someone said looked like a company cook, had a few weeks earlier shown the sort of independence that the career-soldiers Birdwood and White never quite managed. The Anzacs and many of the British divisions were exhausted. The Canadians were to be brought into the Ypres campaign as fresh troops. Currie, the corps commander, a real estate agent before the war, at once said they didn’t want to serve under Gough. Currie thought him inept, and that was the polite version. Haig put the Canadians under Plumer.
Every Canadian, Currie wrote afterwards, hated to go to Passchendaele. ‘I carried my protest to the extreme limit … which I believe would have resulted in my being sent home had I been other than the Canadian Corps Commander. I pointed out what the casualties were bound to be, and asked if a success would justify the sacrifice. I was ordered to go and make the attack.’ According to one of Currie’s biographers, Haig gave Currie no reason for continuing the campaign on the wet and stinking ground. He simply said that Passchendaele had to be taken and ‘some day I will tell you why’.
Currie won the concession he wanted. He needed time, at least a fortnight, to prepare. He wanted to give his men the artillery protection that the Anzac and British troops had been denied. He set engineers to work at stabilising gun platforms, improving roads and drainage channels, constructing light railways and laying telephone lines. Currie decided that instead of trying to take the village in one bound, he would creep up on it in three steps, each of about 500 yards. He brought his troops into the frontline early so that, unlike the Anzacs, they would not go into the attack exhausted from an approach march through mud. And, all through, Currie went back and forth to the front in the rain, looking for himself, finding out for himself, talking to gunners, infantrymen, engineers and medical staff, insisting that this be changed and that be fixed. This was what gave him a style all of his own among the Great War generals. He was not only careful in his planning; he had to see the ground. Maps were not enough. Pencils always travelled over maps more easily than men.
Lieutenant Fisher of the 3rd Australian Division knew all about the ground. He and his men pulled back 1000 yards as the Canadians came up. ‘Here we stayed four days, and got shelled to hell, but no-one minds that – a shell drops alongside, and one merely calls it a bastard, curses the Hun, and wipes off the mud. Anyhow we are out now and I don’t mind much. Only I’d like to have a talk with some war correspondents – liars they are.’ The reaction to his spell at Passchendaele was still to come, he wrote. ‘I’m rather frightened of it – I feel about eighty years old now …’ Fisher survived the German bombardment of the back areas with mustard gas, only to be killed five months later.
THE CANADIANS ATTACKED on October 26 and took their first 500 yards, but at a terrible cost: 3300 casualties. Two Australian battalions fought on the right flank of the Canadians. This was the end of the Australian infantry’s part in the struggle for Passchendaele.
On the evening after this first Canadian battle Lloyd George ordered Hair to send two divisions to Italy at once, with the ominous rider that this was a preliminary measure. The Italians had collapsed at Caporetto on the Isonzo front, where six German divisions had reinforced the Austrians. Those Italians who hadn’t surrendered were in frantic retreat. There was a fear in London that Italy could fall out of the war.
The day before Currie’s attack a young German lieutenant commanding a force of 200-odd had taken 3600 Italian prisoners around Caporetto. He took another 5400 prisoners in the next few days and won the Pour le Mérite, Germany’s highest award for bravery. His name was Erwin Rommel.
The day after Currie’s first attack one of Italy’s most outspoken newspaper editors called for more patriotism. People had to forget about liberty, he wrote. The watchword now was ‘discipline’, which some of his countrymen might have found bemusing, since discipline in the Italian army was cruel, worse arguably than in the Russian army, and this, in turn, was a prime reason why the Italian army had performed so poorly. The editor, barrel-chested and with a great jaw that he thrust forward, had been wounded on the Isonzo front earlier in the year. He was sharp-witted, but had been a bully since childhood. His name was Benito Mussolini.
Italy suffered massive casualties at Caporetto, hundreds of thousands at a time, most of them prisoners of war.
CURRIE TOOK HIS second step on October 30. Again the Canadians gained their 500 yards. They were on the edge of the village. Conditions were frightful. Pigeons became so caked in mud that they couldn’t fly.
The Canadians were to go for the village on November 6. Two days before this Lieutenant-Colonel C. E. L. Lyne, a British artillery officer, wrote: ‘Dante would never have condemned lost souls to wander in so terrible a purgatory … How weirdly it recalls some half formed horror of childish nightmare, one would flee, but whither? – one would cry aloud but there comes no blessed awakening.’ Gas at night was the crowning horror. Lyne would risk only three men to a field gun at the same time because of the gas. ‘I’ve got a throat like raw beef and a voice like a crow … Great days these.’
Ludendorff was not at Passchendaele but he understood it well enough. In his autobiography he said it was worse than Verdun. ‘It was no longer life at all. It was mere unspeakable suffering.’
The Canadians attacked again and took the village after about three hours. They bayoneted Germans in the main street and among the ruins, which were littered with the body parts of Germans hit by shellfire. The church was the only building that was recognisable. The Canadians attacked again on November 10 during a rainstorm, took a little more ground and a few days later were pulled out.
They had run up 12,400 casualties. The Canadian official historian wrote: ‘It is not too much to compare the Canadian troops struggling forward, the pangs of hell wracking their bodies, up the Ridge, their dying eyes set upon the summit, with a Man who once crept another hill, with agony in soul and body, to redeem the world and give Passchendaele its glorious name.’
Haig showed no signs of elation. He did much the same things every day, such as tapping the barometer after dressing, whether the news was good or bad. ‘Today was a very important success,’ he wrote in his diary after the Canadians took the village. As he often did, he got his own casualty figures wrong. As always, his estimate was on the low side. Anyway Haig had no cause for elation, and he knew it. The capture of this village, six-and-a-half miles from the Menin Gate, had not changed the strategic balance on the western front. It was a trifling substitute for what the offensive had once been about, the capture of the Belgian ports. In the days after the Canadian sacrifice Haig began to realise something else. The ground around the village was going to be hard to hold. It constituted a little bump of a salient within the much larger Ypres salient. The Germans could fire into it from three sides.
But Haig’s mind was drifting elsewhere. He was set on one more operatic gesture before the year ended. He was looking to a stretch of the Hindenburg Line south-east of Arras, near Cambrai.
THE STORY GOES – there seems to be no verification of it – that after the final Canadian attack Launcelot Kiggell, Haig’s chief-of-staff, went to look at the front. He became upset as his staff car rocked through the mud and began to weep. ‘Good God,’ he is supposed to have said, ‘did we really send men to fight in that?’
The man next to him knew the front well. ‘It’s worse further on up,’ he replied.
JUST AFTER PASSCHENDAELE fell Lloyd George delivered an energetic speech in Paris in which he called for the establishment of a body to advise on overall allied strategy. Two lines in this speech were loaded with shrapnel; the fuse was set to explode over the heads of Haig and Robertson. ‘We have won great victories,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘When I look at the appalling casualty lists I sometimes wish it had not been necessary to win so many.’
Lloyd George at this time didn’t know the butcher’s bill for Third Ypres. We still don’t know precise figures. Edmonds, Britain’s official historian, put the British and dominion casualties from July 31 at around 240,000. He hinted that the German casualties might be 400,000. Prior and Wilson in Passchendaele estimate British and dominion casualties for Messines and Third Ypres at 275,000, including 70,000 killed. They estimate German losses at Third Ypres at just short of 200,000.
The French, Russian and Italian armies had all broken under pressure. Whatever the final casualty figure, the wonder of the Passchendaele campaign is that it failed to break the spirit of the British and dominion armies. Morale certainly suffered among Australian troops and it was easy enough to measure this. Court-martial charges against Australians for being absent without leave and for desertion peaked in October, 1917. After Third Ypres the rate of imprisonment of Australian troops stood at more than eight times that of the British home army.
If the total British and dominion losses at Third Ypres are still a matter for argument, we know the Australian figures with some precision. The Australians suffered 55,000 casualties for the year, 38,000 of them in Belgium. A crisis was approaching: there simply weren’t enough reinforcements to make up the losses. During September and October, when the Australians had fought their way from Menin Road Ridge to the edge of Passchendaele, enlistments at home had totalled only 5221. A few days before Passchendaele closed down Billy Hughes announced that there would be a second referendum on conscription.
PASSCHENDAELE TODAY IS larger and prettier than it was before the Great War. Back then it was just another crossroads village with a pious name and a church of white stone and red brick. Now it is a word loaded up with symbolism, like Gettysburg or Stalingrad. The war is just beneath the surface. A farmer near here owned a small field that, as he put it, refused to grow anything. One year he set the plough a little deeper than usual. Up came 630 German hand grenades.
One grave at Poelcappelle British Cemetery beckons to visitors. The headstone says that here lies 6322 Private J. Condon of the Royal Irish Regiment. He was killed here in 1915, as were thousands of others. Private Condon was different: he was fourteen.
Ypres used to be about cloth and God. Now it is a plangent town – bells always seem to be ringing somewhere – that each day receives throngs of British pilgrims. They stand in their hundreds at the Menin Gate to hear the Last Post played by buglers with white gloves.
Sometimes the Last Post seems more affecting when the crowd is small. An elderly Belgian woman comes to the ceremony tonight, walking slowly, a collapsible chair in one hand, a walking stick in the other. She sits just inside the eastern end of the arch and wears a beatific smile. Behind her, framed by the farther arch, the spire of the Cloth Hall spears towards clouds bruised with rain. She left here as a child with her parents when the Great War came and grew up in Derbyshire. She was present when the Menin Gate memorial opened in 1927. The townsfolk tell you that sometimes on a cold winter’s night, when few come out for the service, her voice can be heard at the end saying: ‘We will remember them.’